Today, you can catch PerkettPR’s Claire Russell presenting “The Power of Reel” at 1 p.m. EST at IMS. She’ll be partnering with Bettina Hein, Founder & CEO of Pixability, to showcase how easy and powerful video is – and how it can help you to not only tell your story but create stronger relationships and impact in your social marketing efforts. Case studies will include work and campaigns from businesses such as Old Spice, Livestrong, St. Louis Children’s Hospital and more.

Not in Boston at IMS today? Then considering joining me at 1 p.m., along with the American Marketing Association, Conduit (a PerkettPR client), John Jantsch, Author of Duct Tape Marketing and Sally Falkow, as we present “5 Must Dos for Social Media Holiday Marketing.” Focused mainly on how SMBs can use social media to successfully – and easily – expand their holiday marketing efforts. Not convinced social marketing is for you? Check out these facts from the press release:

• More than 50% of the 500 million Facebook users log on to Facebook every day.  In total, they spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the service.
• People are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube; every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to the service.
• Users spend 22.7% of their time online on social networking sites.

I hope we’ll see you either at IMS, FutureM or on the webinar today. Looking forward to sharing insights, learning from others and continuing to merge our online and offline relationships.

Happy marketing!

Nine Marketing Tips from a Six-Year Old’s Lemonade Stand
Jim Lodico guest posts on WebDesignerDepot.com with this great set of marketing tips inspired by his daughter’s lemonade stand.

Why Customer Service Should Be in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Tamar Weinberg shares this great post that reminds us how important customer service can be when engaging in social marketing strategies.

Deep social media engagement pays dividends
Sally Falkow provides an overview (with links to the source) on the eConsultancy.com blog of a recent ENGAGEMENTdb study thats shows how companies with the deepest and widest social media efforts gained revenue over the last 12 months.

Amazon Buys Zappos, Gives Press the Boot
Amazon and Zappos show that sometimes you can deliver the news on your own terms without the help of the media. It was certainly an interesting move considering the size of the news – and it has been yielding opinions on both sides of the fence. Here’s the video that Jeff Bezos released on YouTube: